🎯 What it is

Zen Striker is a browser arcade shooter with a canvas-rendered game, mobile touch controls, player profiles, ranked matchmaking, and leaderboard/friend services. The game simulation and the account/matchmaking service live in separate frontend and backend folders.

🔁 Game and service flow

flowchart LR
  A[Next.js client] --> B[Canvas game loop]
  A --> C[Fastify API]
  C --> D[MongoDB profiles]
  C --> E[Redis presence and matchmaking]
  A <-->|Socket.IO| C
  B --> F[Results and profile state]

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✨ Included systems

• Canvas rendering, game entities, physics, waves, audio, HUD, and pause/results screens.
• Touch-aware controls and game scaling for smaller screens.
• Fastify routes for authentication, users, friends, leaderboard, and matches.
• Socket.IO presence and matchmaking; MongoDB and Redis plugins.

🧰 Stack

Part	Tools
Client	Next.js 15, React 19, TypeScript, Socket.IO client
API	Node.js, Fastify 5, TypeScript, Zod
Persistence	MongoDB/Mongoose, Redis
Auth	signed cookies/JWT flow in backend
Motion/game	Canvas renderer, custom physics and game loop

🚀 Run locally

Start the API:

git clone https://github.com/ChristopherJoshy/ZenStriker.git
cd zen-striker/backend
npm ci
Copy-Item .env.example .env  # PowerShell; use cp on macOS/Linux
npm run dev

Start the web client in a second terminal:

cd zen-striker/frontend
npm install
npm run dev

Configure MongoDB, Redis, cookie/JWT secrets, and the frontend origin in local environment files. The frontend defaults to port 3000 and the API to port 3001.

🗂️ Layout

frontend/app/       auth and game pages
frontend/components/ canvas, HUD, matchmaking and touch UI
frontend/lib/game/  entities, physics, rendering and waves
backend/src/        Fastify routes, plugins and Socket.IO

📄 License

MIT. See LICENSE.